Knowledge Management - CRSynergy Intranets and Portals
 In the beginning, portals provided views into data; today, portals expose core business processes, they extend beyond the enterprise and empower employees and business affiliates with business intelligence. Most importantly, the best portals are producing tremendous returns on investments.
Several technology advancements have brought new power to portals over the last year, including collaboration and business intelligence tools. No one feature makes up the perfect portal, but a well thought-out and deployed intranet/portal solution can bring real business benefit to many
organizations. These benefits can be recognized in increased efficiency, enhanced employee and customer knowledge management, improved business processes, and a greater return on investment.
Increased Efficiency
Organizations can improve efficiency through faster, better-informed decision-making capacity and improved employee/customer satisfaction. Often companies use such technologies as enterprise wide search, business process integration, integrated messaging and self service digital administrative dashboards for rapid deployment of team projects. Enhanced Employee and Customer Knowledge Management Collaboration practices, rapid discovery of new information, and dynamic data integration make it much easier for employees to access, distribute, and share information in real time. The technologies for building intranet/portals make this possible through functions such as document categorization, profiling, enterprise-wide search, and management tools with subscription options for employees to receive automatic notices when information is updated.
 Improved Business Processes
Intranet portals help organizations improve their business processes, and increase efficiency through employee collaboration tools, seamless business process integration with existing systems, and rapid access to dynamic business information. This is made possible through technologies such as an industry standard Web interface, integrated application access and secure approval routing for important documents.
Greater Return on Investments
With improved business processes, manageability, reliability, security, training, and the ability to react faster to customer need, organizations can realize increased returns on their investments. An intranet and portal solution supports this through Web-based interfaces, and a marked reduction in deployment, training, and communications costs.
Business Requirements for an Intranet and Portal Solution
Typical business requirements for a corporate portal include:
- Availability: Intranet applications should always be available, even during upgrades and feature improvements. The systems used to deploy the Intranet/portal must include failover options in case something happens to the main server. Systems must be scalable for reliability and performance.
- Content delivery to multiple audiences for multiple purposes: Content needs to be separated from delivery method. Information may need to be personalized for distinct audiences or individuals in different contexts—either served from different applications or sent to mobile devices.
- Separation of development from production environments: Building the application, adding new features, and reorganizing or redesigning the Intranet/portal site cannot affect the daily publishing of content. Development needs to move on to the next challenge while business users are using the current application. Separation of content from format and production environment from development environment fulfills these requirements.
- Automation of updates: Updates to the Web site or application must happen automatically and consistently. Applications must run themselves without IT overhead.
- Tight integration with existing business procedures: Taking advantage of new Intranet applications should not require you to change the way you do business. Instead, applications must adapt to the business processes and security models you already have in place.
- Tight integration with other e-business applications: Intranets and portals must interact seamlessly with other applications, whether e-commerce, relationship management, document management, or even legacy data systems.
- Multiple Server Deployment: Solutions must be flexible, enabling ease of management for multiple server configurations.
- Enhanced Collaboration: Solution must provide easy and cost-effective means to facilitate joint scheduling, messaging and conferencing.
Intranet and Portal Development, Building an Intranet Site
When you build a Web site for an intranet and portal solution, the same process used to build a traditional Web site applies. However, some of the tasks performed during the steps are different. Also some of the steps may take more or less time compared to building a traditional Web site. For example, while the planning phase may be longer, the development and maintenance phases are significantly reduced.
These variations occur because the Portal is based on components. This factor provides a distinct separation between the development of the structure of the site and the development of the content. The build team composed of Web developers, designers, and project managers, build the site framework, and hand it over to content experts who populate the site with content. The build team is actually creating an application that non-technical staff will use to publish content. In order for these content experts to be self-sufficient, and therefore decrease the time required for site maintenance, the site has to be built with their unique requirements in mind. As a result of this and other features, the build process varies from the traditional approach.
Project Phases and Deliverables
Individual project managers may have different names for the phases or attach different tasks to them, but the methodology is based on common Web solution development practices. These development steps may be performed by an in-house team consisting of Web developers, designers, content architects and experts—or by one of our professional Web development teams.
The deliverables at each stage include:
Envisioning
During this initial investigation phase, the team determines the goals, objectives, and business requirements for the project. Investigation includes the reasons for implementing an intranet and portal solution and the reasons for building the site. In these two cases, you determine the goals and objectives for the new site before creating it. In addition the scope of the project is defined. In many cases, the initial phase of the project will focus on solving the most pressing business problems and integrating with the solutions that are already in place. Subsequent project phases can then focus on adding products to provide additional functionality and customizing the solution to solve additional business problems. This approach provides the most timely solution delivery and helps minimize project risk.
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Description |
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Project Proposal |
High-level document indicating the goals and business scope of the project. Sign-off of this document is required before the project continues. |
Proof of Concept
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The Web team may prototype some templates as proof of concept. This deliverable is often completed if the site is a migration of an existing site. This work can often be reused during the development phase. |
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Planning
In this phase you define all elements of the portal site and project that are required to build it. This includes specifications for:
- Design
- Functionality
- Components including web parts, navigation, templates, and workflow.
- Deployment
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Description |
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| Scope Document |
Definition of the size of the project including areas of responsibility.
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| Project Plan |
Project Plan consisting of:
- Project Specifications
- Project Schedule
- Budget Estimate
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Development
Like the site planning phase, the site development phase includes a number of tasks that are unique to an intranet and portal implementation.
Site development is usually a two-phased approach. The development team builds the site framework and templates, develops and integrates the various components, tests the usability and functionality of both the site and the templates, and then hands it over to the subject matter experts for content development. While these content experts are populating the site, the development team can continue to work on other development work, like advanced integration tasks, which are not content-related. |
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Unit Testing
The process of building an intranet and portal site is iterative. You build one channel and its associated templates, and hand it over to the content experts before the entire site is finished. This way, the development team can test assumptions made during the planning phase and ensure that the site structure, templates, and workflow meet the needs of the content experts.
Content management systems help speed the unit testing with its workflow process. Experts test and verify content through this workflow process before it is published.
Most links on content managed sites are generated dynamically, so you do not need to test any navigational links. Link testing is restricted to links that have been added manually. These links should also be tested during the content review process |
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| Deliverable |
Description |
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| Portal site ready to install on production server |
Web site completed to standards specified in project plan. Unit tested, ready for system testing. |
Documentation |
Complete documentation for functional areas of site and for content experts regarding how to use the templates. |
Weekly status reports |
Weekly reports delivered to project stakeholders during the project. |
Training |
Training for some content experts who participate in the unit testing of templates and iterative development cycle. |
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Stabilizing and Monitoring
This is the final stage in the delivery of the project. It involves deploying the site to the production environment, system testing the portal in that environment, archiving the completed project, and launching the final intranet site. |
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Description |
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Completed functional Web site |
Completed Web site installed, tested, and operational in production environment. |
Acceptance documents |
Documents signed by team members and project stakeholders certifying that the project has been successfully delivered. |
Training |
Training for Web development or IT groups who will take over responsibility for the site. Training for broad group of content experts. |
Archive |
Archive of completed site from production environment for future reference. |
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Publishing
Choosing a Publishing Process
Identifying the publication process best suited to your documents helps you decide what folder type to use. Publishing a document creates a public version that is available to readers of a folder. Review the types of documents used in your organization. Which document types can be published immediately? Which document types should remain private until ready for a larger audience of readers?
Adding Approval Routing
Often one or more people must review and approve a document's content. In this situation, consider adding approval routing to the document publishing process. In approval routing, a document is sent to one or more people, and each person can approve or reject the document. Each step in the approval process is complete when the required people approve or reject the document. An approver receives an e-mail notification when a document requires his review.
Content Plan
As part of the planning process, the business users and content experts should develop a content plan. This plan identifies all the types of content on the site and their sources. Use the content plan to determine what type of web parts and page templates will be built.
Security
Security Planning
Security is essential for both intranet and portal activities. In document management, it is important to restrict access to sensitive information. In document approval scenarios, it is important to restrict the viewing of a document to those who edit or approve it until it is ready for a larger audience. In search scenarios, it is important that security settings are recognized for content that is crawled so that users, when viewing the results of searches, are not made aware of documents to which they have no access.
Knowing where information is stored and how your organization uses it helps you to clarify your deployment goals. The Content Management Server component of an intranet and portal solution offers complete feature sets for content contribution and delivery, site development, and enterprise site management to enable businesses to effectively create, deploy, and manage internet, intranet, and extranet Web sites. |
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Conclusion
While each of the component products that make up a intranet and portal solution provides a great deal of business value in their own right, the solution they come together to produce is much more valuable than the sum of its parts.
An intranet and portal solution delivers a well-tested, well-optimized, well-targeted deployment of a set of products that creates an enterprise-class knowledge management infrastructure. Services and support options exist to deploy and support a solution that is ready to deliver business value on day one.
Moreover, while several services (for example, search, document management, team collaboration) are ready upon deployment, the entire solution creates an extensible platform on which to build even greater functionality.
The consulting resources of GPL Integrated IT, LLC are poised and ready to provide assistance for you and your company. Interested organizations can contact us for further information on the solution’s component software, services, and support options. |
